New music
edward.seckerson
Edward Seckerson talks to actor/singer Nigel Richards about his new album A Shining Truth - a handsome compendium of 14 hitherto unrecorded musical theatre songs by major talents as Howard Goodall, Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa, Conor Mitchell, Richard Taylor, and others no less significant. Musical Theatre aficionados will recall Nigel's unforgettable performance in the title role of Adam Guettel's masterpiece Floyd Collins at London's Bridewell Theatre and will know that few have done more to champion the cause of new writing than he has. This isn’t an album it’s a manifesto - and you Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s interesting to ponder why, after 22 years in the business, the Indigo Girls aren’t more successful or better known outside the cognoscenti and their very loyal fanbase. Their intricate harmonies and beautifully constructed guitar-based folk-rock has attracted many fans (and sometime collaborators) in the music industry - from Natalie Merchant and Ani DiFranco to Lucinda Williams and REM - and one of their albums went platinum. They even won a Grammy, so what’s not to like?Ah, well there’s the small matter of their political activism - for indigenous peoples’ rights, on green issues and Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Most boys grow up playing Cowboys and Indians. Thing is, I never grew out of it. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to write my own variant on the great American road book. I pinpoint three pre-adolescent experiences that warped my mind: reading Huckleberry Finn, seeing Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and hearing Bo Diddley. Inevitably, reading Kerouac ruined me. Not that I headed to the US expecting things to be as they were in Jack’s time. Yet just how harsh poor America can be to live and travel amongst did surprise me. The title of More Miles than Money: Journeys through American Read more ...
joe.muggs
It comes to something when the logic of a German act calling themselves “Gas” is the least troubling element of a perfomance. Not that Wolfgang Voigt's ambient music, or the slowly-evolving digital art of Petra Hollenbach projected on the Barbican's cinema screen, contained any obvious shock tactics – but the whole 80 minutes created just about as unsettling an experience as one could imagine from abstracted sound and image.As a club music producer and as one of the co-founders of Cologne's Kompakt label, Voigt has been responsible for some of the most emotive and lastingly affective techno Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would-be axe murderers of the BBC often propose to lop off (among other things) TV channels Three and Four, but Four’s music coverage is vastly better value for viewers’ money than the executive pension fund. Synth Britannia stuck firmly to Four’s “Britannia” formula, being a bunch of talking heads and clumps of archive footage interwoven with synth-pop classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties. But that’s OK as long as the raw material is strong, and this saga of post-punk, pre-New Romantic gadget-pop was often fascinating and sometimes even thought-provoking.Not that they didn’t Read more ...
robert.sandall
Performing your classic album as a full concert item has become a significant part of rock’s heritage culture in recent years, and the tide of potential classics is rising all the time. Last night, it was the turn of Spiritualized to re-visit their 1997 opus, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.One of the most critically feted releases of the Britpop era - the NME voted it Album of the Year in 1997 ahead of two competing blockbusters, OK Computer by Radiohead and The Verve’s Urban Hymns – this ambitiously styled record always carried the aura of an event, and 12 years later its Read more ...
edward.seckerson
theartsdesk.com presents The Seckerson Tapes, a series of live and uncut audio interviews from acclaimed broadcaster Edward Seckerson. We start with Jamie Bernstein - Leonard Bernstein's eldest daughter - who has been in London launching the year-long Bernstein Project at the South Bank. Seckerson, a long-standing Bernstein devotee and disciple, sat down for a frank and open discussion about exactly who her "dad" was.This is the uncut interview.
Russ Coffey
With her impish looks and translucent, near-perfect voice Cara Dillon does well to avoid the “coffee table” epithet. As a "product" she looks prime for mass marketing into the suburban dinner party circuit. But as an artist she is much better than that.She’s much too good, for instance, to have become better known simply as folk star Seth Lakeman’s sister-in-law. It's true that she has faultless musical connections but her musical pedigree is also impeccable. Dillon grew up in Derry immersed in whistles and fiddles and at the age of 20 replaced Kate Rusby in the folk super-group, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I am not that objective about Magma. For one thing, when I saw them as a 16-year-old in the Seventies the intensity of the band caused me to have an out-of-body experience, something that has happened neither before or since. It’s the kind of thing you remember. It’s hard to formulate balanced critical opinions when you are floating up near the ceiling, looking down on your body. I met the leader and creative visionary behind the band, Christian Vander, a couple of weeks before last night’s Barbican concert, which was billed as a Celestial Mass. As someone more expressive than me put it Read more ...
howard.male
If Bowie, Bolan, and Roxy Music were the shimmering glam triumvirate of early 1970s British pop, then what were Mott the Hoople? Surely they don’t belong with the likes of the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and… er… Gary Glitter. In fact with their R&B and rock 'n' roll roots they’ve more in common with some of the decade’s more credible rockers such as the Faces or even the New York Dolls. It was in their ragged swagger and the stylised arrogance that vocalist Ian Hunter projected while implicitly inviting every teenager in the land to join his gang rather than that bacofoil-clad impostor’s gang.But Read more ...
robert.sandall
You’ve got to take the pedal off the metal at some point, and in 2009 the prodigiously energetic New Yorker Joan Wasser – otherwise known as Joan As Police Woman - has apparently decided to ease up and release an album of cover versions.Any suspicions, however, that this might result in a night of cute karaoke knockabout were dispelled as soon as she took to the stage for an ecstatically received, sold-out show at London’s Union Chapel last night. Having spent the past 15 years working alongside pop auteurs of the calibre of Antony (of the Johnsons), Rufus Wainwright and Jeff Buckley, her Read more ...
joe.muggs
For some people, dubstep has an identity problem. Its suburban origins and recent global spread, its propensity for hybridity, the relatively genial nature of the scene, and perhaps worst of all its popularity with – whisper it – students lead some commentators to regard it with suspicion. A common attack is to compare it unfavourably with either its antecedent jungle (the wild polyrhythmic early-mid 1990s precursor to drum & bass), or its first cousin grime (the fearsomely jagged, lyrically ultra-violent sound of London's pirate radio stations in the first part of this decade): next to Read more ...